Engage Discounts & Coupons

Engage allows you to generate unique discount codes to include in emails sent to customers. They are completely unique for each email sent. 

When creating an Engage email, you can add a discount in the message section; just scroll down and click the add discount button:

Coupons for WooCommerce

You'll find almost all of the settings that you see in WooCommerce when generating a coupon. They are split into three sections: General, Restrictions, and Limits. 

General

Discount Type: This the type of discount you'd like to offer. It can be one of the following:

• Percentage discount – A percentage discount for the entire cart. For example, if the cart contains three (3) t-shirts @ $20 each = $60, a coupon for 10% off applies a discount of $6.
• Fixed cart discount – A fixed total discount for the entire cart. For example, if the cart contains three (3)  t-shirts @ $20 each = $60, a coupon for $10 off gives a discount of $10.
• Fixed product discount – A fixed total discount for selected products only. Customer receives a set amount of discount per item. For example, three (3) t-shirts @ $20 each with a coupon for $10 off applies a discount of $30.
• Subscriptions: Sign Up Fee Discount.
• Subscriptions: Sign Up Fee % Discount.
• Subscriptions: Recurring Product Discount.
• Subscriptions: Recurring Product % Discount.

Amount: Fixed value or percentage, depending on the discount type you choose. Entered without a currency unit or a percent sign, which are added automatically, e.g., Enter ’20’ for $20 or 20%.

Expiry Date: How many days after being generated and sent that the coupon should expire. Check the specific box to specify an actual date (4 April 2020) instead. Leave it blank if there should be no expiry. 

Code Prefix: Metorik will generate a random coupon code for each email sent by default. By adding a prefix (like XMAS), we'll add it to the start of each code, so instead of being for e.g., '9213AI20P', it would be 'XMAS9213AI20P'.

Allow Free Shipping: Removes shipping cost when coupon is used. Requires Free Shipping to be enabled.

Restrictions

Minimum Spend: The minimum spend (subtotal) allowed to use this coupon.

Maximum Spend: The maximum spend (subtotal) allowed to use this coupon.

Individual Use Only: Check the box if you don’t want this coupon to be used in combination with other coupons. By default, this is checked.

Exclude Sale Items: Check this box if the coupon should not apply to items on sale. Per-item coupons will only work if the item is not on sale. Per-cart coupons will only work if there are items in the cart that are not on sale.

Restrict to customer email: Check this box if you want the coupon to have an email restriction so it can just be used by the email of the customer who received the coupon.

Products: Products that the coupon will be applied to, or that need to be in the cart in order for the 'Fixed cart discount' to be applied.

Exclude Products: Products that the coupon will not be applied to, or that cannot be in the cart in order for the 'Fixed cart discount' to be applied.

Categories: Categories that the coupon will be applied to, or that cannot be in the cart in order for the 'Fixed cart discount' to be applied.

Exclude Categories: Categories that the coupon will not be applied to, or that cannot be in the cart in order for the 'Fixed cart discount' to be applied.

Limits

Usage Limit (per coupon): This is the number of the times the coupon can be used. By default, it is set to 1, but if you wanted to let the receiving customer use it multiple times, this option lets you define the limit.

Usage Limit (to X items): The maximum number of individual items this coupon can apply to when using product discounts. Leave blank to apply to all qualifying items in the cart.

Delete expired coupons automatically

When coupons expire, you may want them to be deleted automatically since they can't be used any more but are taking up space in your database. To do so, I'd recommend following this guide.

Coupons for Shopify

General

Discount Type: This the type of discount you'd like to offer. It can be one of the following:

• Percentage – A percentage discount for the entire cart. For example, if the cart contains three (3) t-shirts @ $20 each = $60, a coupon for 10% off applies a discount of $6.
• Fixed Amount – A fixed total discount for the entire cart. For example, if the cart contains three (3)  t-shirts @ $20 each = $60, a coupon for $10 off gives a discount of $10.
• Free shipping — Instead of offering a discount off the actual products, you can choose to offer free shipping.

Amount: Fixed value or percentage, depending on the discount type you choose.  Entered without a currency unit or a percent sign, which are added automatically, e.g., Enter ’20’ for $20 or 20%.

Expiry Date: How many days after being generated and sent that the coupon should expire. Check the specific box to specify an actual date (20 April 2020) instead. Leave it blank if there should be no expiry. 

Code Prefix: Metorik will generate a random coupon code for each email by default. By adding a prefix (like XMAS), we'll add it to the start of each code, so instead of being for e.g., '9213AI20P', it would be 'XMAS9213AI20P'.

Restrictions

Minimum Spend: The minimum spend (subtotal) allowed to use this coupon.

Limits

Usage Limit (per coupon): This is the number of the times the coupon can be used. By default, it is set to 1, but if you wanted to let the receiving customer use it multiple times, this option lets you define the limit.

Using a previously sent discount code

When setting the rules for a discount, you can check the setting to use the previously sent discount code instead of generating a new one.

When checked, instead of generating a new code at the time of emailing, Metorik will look at all past emails sent to the same order/customer/cart that had a discount code and use the latest one it can find.

This is resource specific, so for example a cart automation won't try find a code sent in a previous customer automation - only other cart automations.

When would you use this setting? This can be useful for sending a campaign of emails and using the same discount code throughout them.

So with an abandoned cart email campaign, your first email may have a unique coupon code generated for eg. 20% off. Then in the second email, you'd check the use previously sent discount code option so it uses the first email's coupon code instead of making a second code.

What if we can't generate a coupon?

When an email is sent with a discount in it, the first thing we'll do is try to generate a discount code for it on your store. If this fails for any reason, eg. your store is down, another plugin on your store stops us, etc., we will mark the email as failed with the reason 'discount coupon failed'. We will also send the store owner an email to let them know this has happened (once per week) and how to fix it.

To see why we can't generate coupons, you can use our coupon testing tool.

You can view all emails that failed to send due to this reason here. From that page, you can resend failed emails and we'll try to create the coupon and send it again. If you have a large number of failed emails, feel free to let us know and we can re-send these for you on our end.

For assistance figuring out why we can't generate coupon codes for your store, please contact us.

Auto-applying coupons

You can optionally check the 'auto-apply coupons' setting to automatically apply the generated coupon for the customer when they click a link in an email. This way they won't need to manually copy and paste the coupon when checking out.

If you have a generic coupon you want to automatically apply, you can do that by simply adding ?mtkc=COUPON to any store links, where COUPON is a valid coupon code. So for example, if my store link is http://teststore.com and my coupon code was HAPPY25, I'd send customers to http://teststore.com?mtkc=HAPPY25.

If you'd like to apply a generic coupon code to cart recovery links though, check out the doc on that here as the instructions differ a bit.

Generating coupon codes for email previews

When sending a preview email with Engage, by default we won't generate a real coupon code in the preview, as this would result in lots of 'test' coupons being created in your store.

However, you may want to preview a email with a real coupon, so we have a way for you to optionally generate a coupon code when sending the preview.

When you select Generate coupon and send preview, we'll create an actual coupon on your site for the preview. If we fail to generate a coupon for some reason - eg. we don't have the appropriate API permissions, the coupon code will be blank in the email. Learn more about discount failures here.